No toilet at home, no marriage - this had been the position of three would-be brides.    Now that their demand has been accepted, and each one of them were Rewarded with a cash award of Rs. 2 lakh on Wednesday by Sulabh International, an organisation in the forefront of the sanitation movement. "I was embarrassed to know women relieve themselves in the open and worried something unpleasant might happen to me. Though...

-PTI Awarded Rs.2 lakh each by Sulabh International Low-cost sanitation organisation Sulabh International on Wednesday awarded Rs.2 lakh each to three brides who revolted against the absence of toilets at their in-laws’ residence. Sulabh founder Bindeshwar Pathak gave away the awards to Priyanka Bharti, Priyanka and Kumari Jyoti at a function organised at Vishnupur village, 30 km from the district headquarters. Modern toilets constructed Sulabh has constructed modern toilets for them. Dr. Pathak announced a “Sulabh...

-The Telegraph A US government report has painted a gloomy picture of human trafficking in the Northeast. The US state department’s 2012 Trafficking in Persons Report, released by secretary of state Hillary Clinton yesterday, said there had been a rise in women from the region being subjected to “servile marriages” in states with low female-to-male child sex ratios such as Haryana and Punjab. According to the report, girls from the Northeast are also...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has Rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...

-The Christian Sciences Monitor Wealthy Western nations are financially exhausted and unwilling to commit to help fund greener development for poorer nations. Will this week's conference in Rio find any solutions? So what happens if you hold a UN conference on sustainable development, and world leaders make speeches, and sign treaties, and then nothing happens? This, of course, would be absurd. The problem, says Bill Easterly, a development expert at New York University,...